American Liberty

Spreading the ideas of freedom. Discusses economic, political, and social issues in the context of liberty and individual rights. Shows freedom and capitalism are essential to human advancement on all levels. Identifies government actions that are anti-liberty and detrimental to our rights, our lives and health, and the nation's prosperity and future.

Sunday, March 01, 2015

This is the last of a series
of postings on how government food regulations intended to improve
the diet of Americans have been consistent long-term failures. They
have been not only futile but detrimental to the health of millions
of people, as demonstrated in the these postings: (Click on highlighted word for the post.)

In the first of the above
series we explained how the government for over a half century
perpetuated the fraudulent ideas about saturated fat in foods raising
cholesterol and, consequently, heart attacks. Government promoted
eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables to replace
meat, eggs and cheese. “The
problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes
the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically
efficient at storing fat....Excessive
carbohydrates lead not only to obesity
but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart
disease.”

In the second of the series
we explained how the federal school lunch program has made nutrition
worse for children, leaving more of them unsatisfied and hungry. The
program has resulted in fewer children drinking milk, many going
without meals, and schools—even whole districts—dropping out
of the program. Enormous amounts of money are spent, and vast
quantities of food are wasted while children go hungry and are buying
more “junk” food to satisfy their hunger.

The third in the series
shows government policies on salt are more dangerous than the salt
Americans devour. For decades the governmentmedical
establishment claimed Americans consumed too much salt,
raising the
risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and stroke.The
recommended daily sodium intake was 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams or
lower. But research has shown that people consuming 3,000 to 6,000
milligrams have the lowest risk of heart problems, stroke or death.
Those
consuming 3,000 or fewer milligrams of sodium were found to have a
27% higher risk of heart problems, stroke or death.

If
a private company or organization compiled that kind of record, it
would have ceased to exist long ago, not persisted as the federal
government has in this field for 35 years with pseudo-science and bad
advice. As we have shown, the people would be healthier without
these government efforts. Yet there is virtually no chance Congress
will end this and countless other unsuccessful programs which the
federal government should have never gotten into in the first place,
where it has no constitutional authority. It has simply usurped
powers it was never intended to have, and those usurpations have been
abetted by U.S. Supreme Court decisions which are themselves
violative of the Constitution. Thus we can expect no redress from
Congress or the Supreme Court for the almost continuous expansion of
federal regulations and control over our lives since the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

It
seems our only solution would be through another constitutional
convention by an application of two-thirds of the legislatures of the
states to consider amendments, as specified in Article V of the
Constitution. In my books I have written more extensively on this
subject and identified specific amendments that are necessary to
reign in the federal government and reverse particular Supreme Court
rulings.

Nobel
Prize winner Friedrich Hayek, author of The
Road to Serfdom,
wrote, “By
giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can
be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most
complete despotism imaginable.” We are well down that road he
warned against.

Friday, January 30, 2015

You
can see immediately that 2014 is not the hottest year among even the
last 18 years. Not by a long shot. Why is this chart be so
different from the widely reported announcement in January by NOAA
and NASA that 2014 was the hottest ever (“ever” being just since
1880, when records began)? The difference results from different
temperature data being used. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) base
their analyses on surface temperature measurements. The graph shown
above is based on satellite measurements, which are far more accurate
and don't show any warming. Satellite measurements show 2014 was
only the sixth warmest year of the last 18.

Since
72 percent of the earth's surface is covered by oceans, temperature
measurements are unavailable for a large part of the earth's surface.
By contrast, satellite measurements cover the entire earth not just
at the surface but at various elevations all the way to the top of
the atmosphere. There are over 160 meteorological satellites
orbiting the earth and transmitting 80 million measurements every day
to an accuracy of one one-hundredth of a degree. Land based
thermometers can do no better than one-tenth of a degree. Clearly
the satellite data is far more comprehensive and accurate than that
of the surface stations. In fact, the satellite measurement systems
were developed because of the weaknesses and inaccuracies of the
land-based network. Yet neither NASA nor NOAA use the satellite
data.

Those
two agencies reported the amount of warming that made 2014 the
hottest year was two-hundredths of a degree. No mention was made of
the accuracy of the measurement or the range of probable error. It
is against normal scientific practice to have a margin of error
greater than the precision of the measurement. Yet a two-hundredths
degree of warming was reported based on temperature measurements with
an accuracy of one-tenth of a degree—that is, the error bar was
five times larger than the reported result. An error of a tenth of a
degree is in the statistical 95% uncertainty range.

Even
greater uncertainty has been exposed by examination of the data
itself. It has been subjected to bias, both deliberate and
unintentional, in several ways which do not occur with satellite
data.

In
2007 it was revealed that GISS had been artificially inflating U.S.
temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius since the year 2000. NASA had
claimed that six of the ten hottest years in U.S. history had
occurred since 1995. When the erroneous data was corrected, 1998 (an
unusually warm year due to El Nino—not carbon dioxide) was no
longer the warmest year of the past century in the US. It fell to
second place, with 1934 now being the warmest. And third place now
belonged to 1921, not 2006. The formerly high-ranking years 2000,
2002, 2003 and 2004 fell well down the leader board—behind even
1900. Four of the top ten were now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938,
1939. Since more than 80 percent of the century's increase in
atmospheric carbon dioxide occurred after 1940, the warmer
temperatures of earlier years can't be explained by higher carbon
dioxide levels. So why should we believe all the hype about
increased CO2 emissions causing catastrophic warming in the future?
Remember, too, that while CO2 was increasing steadily since 1940, the
earth's temperature was decreasing from 1940 until 1975—leading to
widespread media reports about fears of a new ice age.

In
April 2008 Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre
documented that NASA has been “rewriting history time and time
again.” Still, NASA continued the process. It falsely
reported that October 2008 was the warmest October on record.
Statistical scientists jumped on this claim, leading even NASA to
admit it was wrong.

Then
meteorologist Anthony Watts caught GISS and James Hansen doctoring
data records from Santa Rosa, California, and potentially other
temperature stations. The charts below show how Hansen and his
underlings turned a long-term decline into a long-term temperature
increase.

Raw
Data:

Figure
2

GISS
“Adjustment”:

Figure
3

Figure
2 shows actual readings
reported by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). GISS
arrives at its numbers,
illustrated on Figure 3, by taking the USHCN data and applying secret
adjustments. USHCN reports a temperature decline of nearly one-half
degree Celsius during the twentieth century, while GISS reports an
increase of one-half a degree. Hansen has refused to explain how and
why he makes these adjustments.
His s
secrecy raises an ethical and perhaps legal question of whether the
head of an agency federally funded by U.S. taxpayers can refuse to
disclose how those funds are spent. It also raises the question of
whether the adjustments are legitimate or merely deliberate
manipulations contrived to produce a desired result.

James
Hansen is the NASA scientist who started the whole global warming
hysteria in 1988 when he told a Senate committee he was 99 percent
sure global warming was already underway. The news media
seized upon Hansen's unsupported
testimony and parlayed it into an
impending planetary crisis. A new industry was born. Billions of
dollars were spent, and tens of thousands of jobs were created,
giving rise to growing numbers of people with vested interests in
promoting the specter of global warming. James Hansen gave them
ammunition. For years, as head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies (GISS), he has “repeatedly been caught providing erroneous
temperature reports that always err on the side of claiming more
warming than has occurred,” wrote James Taylor in the February
2009 issue of Environment
& Climate News.
Perhaps this explains why Hansen has been adamantly opposed to having
NASA utilize satellite temperature data.

There
are five official temperature data records. Three of these are
surface records. The other two are satellite records furnished by
Remote Sensing Service (RSS) and the University of Alabama at
Huntsville (UAL).

The
three surface records are NASA's (GISS), NOAA, and the University of
East Anglia/Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office. All three are
run by passionate believers in man-made global warming, and all three
depend on data
supplied by ground stations via the
Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), managed by the US National
Climate Data Center under NOAA. A
shocking report
by
two veteran meteorologists Anthony Watts and Joseph D'Aleo states,
“All the data centers, most notably NOAA and NASA, conspired in the
manipulation of global temperature records.” Thus all three do not
display independent research confirming the work of the others;
instead they demonstrate their common corruption.

Here's
another example of tampering with climate data, this one reported
very recently, January 2015. It covers massive falsification of
records for 65 years of data covering a vast area stretching across
Brazil and Paraguay. Paul Homewood
noticed that this area, according to GISS records, showed a
temperature rise between 1950 and 2014 of more than twice the
accepted global increase for the entire century. He was able to
compare the original data with what was reported by GISS. Far from
the temperature increase shown by GISS, the original data showed the
temperatures declined by a full degree over those 65 years. The
graphs below demonstrate this difference for the Puerto Casada
station.

The
adjusted graph from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

Figure
4

Below,
the raw data in graph form:

Figure
5

Only
two other rural stations exist in this vast area, and Homewood found
the same thing happened with data there. You can see these graphs
here.

There
is a far larger and more serious distortion in the global temperature
data than falsifying the reports from the individual measuring stations.
Temperature
records throughout the world have been falsified by manipulating the locations of the reporting stations. Beginning about 1990, higher-altitude,
higher-latitude, and rural stations were removed from the network in
order to create a false warming trend. The global temperature record
that used to be based on 6,000 reporting stations now is based on
fewer than 1,500. The thoroughly-researched 106-page report by
Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts documents the effect with this
graph:

Figure
6

The
rise
in global temperature correlates with eliminating data
from weather stations likely to show cooling,

In
many cases the stations are still reporting, but their data are no
longer utilized. Often the stations have been replaced by others more
likely to show warming from lower elevations, lower latitudes, or
urban development, which reflects the well-known “heat island”
effect of cities. Data gaps are filled in by extrapolating from
nearby stations. Here are some examples
from the D'Aleo/Watts report:

"In
the cold countries of Russia and Canada, the rural stations in the
Polar Regions were thinned out leaving behind the lower latitude more
urban stations. The data from the remaining cities were used to
estimate the temperatures to the north. As a result the computed new
averages were higher than the averages when the cold stations were
part of the monthly/yearly assessment.

"In
Canada, the number of stations dropped from 600 to less than 50. The
percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet)
tripled and those at the higher elevations above 3,000 feet were
reduced by half. [The] depicted warmth comes from interpolating from
more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as
a simple average of the available stations shows an apparent
cooling."

Environment
Canada reports that there are 1400 weather stations in Canada, many
reporting even hourly readings that are readily available on the
internet but not included in the global data base. Canada has 100
stations north of the Arctic Circle, but NOAA uses just one.

The
Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claims the Hadley
Center has tampered with the Russian data: "The IEA believes
the Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the
anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian
meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory and
that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25 percent of
such stations in its reports. The Russian station count dropped from
476 to 121 so over 40 percent of Russian territory was not included
in global temperature calculations for some other reasons than the
lack of meteorological stations and observations."

The
Russians found that the 121 sites used gave mostly warmer reports
than the 355 unused sites. In some cases stations records going back
into the 19th Century were ignored in favor of stations with less
data but which pointed to warming. The IEA team stated, “Only one
tenth of meteorological sites with complete temperature series are
used.”

In
Europe higher mountain stations were dropped and thermometers were
marched toward the Mediterranean, lower elevations, and more cities.
The station dropout was almost 65 percent for Europe as a whole and
50 percent for the Nordic countries.

Africa
is not showing warming despite efforts to make it appear so by
eliminating thermometers from cool areas like the Moroccan coast and
moving them toward the Sahara.

Analyst
E. Michael Smith found that most of the stations remaining in the
United States are at airports. Most mountain stations of the west are
gone. In California the only remaining stations are in San Francisco,
Santa Maria, Los Angeles and San Diego.

As
recently as 1988, temperature records for China came from over 400
stations. In 1990, only 35.

The
raw temperature data show no trend in temperatures in Northern
Australia in 125 years. The IPCC, however, uses “adjusted” data.
NOAA makes data “adjustments” to remove “inhomogeneities” and
for other reasons. The D'Aleo/Watts report says, “We have five
different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost
exactly. Why adjust them at all? NOAA added a huge, artificial,
imaginary trend to the most recent half of the raw data.” The raw
temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 C. per century. After the
NOAA adjustment, the temperatures were rising 1.2 C per century.

NASA
applies an “urbanization adjustment,” but Steve McIntyre reveals
that NASA made the adjustment in the wrong direction, exaggerating
the warming effect instead of showing what the temperatures would be
without urban development.NASA
is always tampering with its data. John Goetz has shown it “adjusted”
20 percent of its data sixteen times in two and a half years.

Lastly,
we take note of the absurdity of recent studies and observations
purporting to show that the effects of global warming are already
occurring. In a cause-and-effect relationship, the effect cannot occur before the cause. You
can't have effects from global warming when there is no global
warming and has been none for over 18 years—despite
a massive increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Clearly carbon dioxide emissions have not caused global warming, because the actual
temperature records show no warming. Those records have been
falsified to justify the global warming doctrine for political
purposes.

About Me

Edmund Contoski has had a varied career. He is a former director of planning for an internationally renowned environmental consulting firm doing business in more than forty countries. He has been an urban planner and held responsible positions with major real estate development companies. In addition, he has lectured widely on international monetary issues and done economic research on a variety of subjects, including world trade. He’s the author of three books: The Impending Monetary Revolution, The Dollar and Gold, the award-winning MAKERS AND TAKERS: How Wealth and Progress are Made and How They are Taken Away or Prevented, and The Trojan Project, a novel of political intrigue that deals with the restructuring of the United States government. A frequent guest on radio talk shows, his views have been heard on well over one hundred radio stations across the United States and Canada. He has also spoken at various colleges and universities and at conventions.